This book is an interesting study into what happens when a food production society encounters a hunter-gatherer society. One of the key differences between the two societies is that hunter-gatherer societies simply take or cajole what they need from the environment, whereas in a food production society, the members control the environment to produce what they need.

Diamond documents the rise of food production societies from hunter-gatherer societies and the environmental components necessary. Race was not found to be a factor. Throughout known history, in every instance he could document, Diamond found upon the collision of the two societies, the hunter-gatherer society would either be absorbed by the food production society (with its higher technology) or eradicated.

I did a little leap of logic from this study to an earlier work, “The Story of Civilization” by Will Durant.

In the 1600’s, a few experiments in communism were conducted by Jesuits in South America. They created a few stable communes out of hunter-gatherer groups and were able to thereby convert them to food production societies. Then, a neighboring group would attack and conquer them, ending the experiment.

I couldn’t help but wonder, if communism can be used as a stepping stone from hunter-gatherer to a food production paradigm, could it work the other way around? Can socialism and communism be used to convert a free market, food production, technological society into a hunter-gatherer society? Is this an inherent human mechanism that liberals stumbled upon and exploited to convert independent individuals to government dependents?

Is this what has happened in Detroit and all major cities where industry has been strangled by unions, and the resulting poor and minorities have been corralled into a government defined area and exiled from the food production society?

In an urban hunter gatherer-society, we see people doing whatever it takes to extract the wherewithal for survival from their environment, the government. And in the absence of animal prey, the hunters hunt fellow citizens to harvest the resources they need.

If you look at the gangs and wildings that are becoming more prevalent in the inner cities, and areas they can reach by public transportation, look at them as hunters instead of criminals. Could this be why there is no hew and cry against this behavior within our inner-cities. In a food production society, such behavior is criminal; in a hunter-gatherer society it is a survival skill.

If that is what we are witnessing, will this help us to understand it better and resolve the conflicts? While we all know that education is the key component, without first understanding their viewpoint, can we deliver a viable education? Given that most of our academic programs promote socialism, is academia re-enforcing the hunter-gatherer paradigm instead of preparing our youth to be independent and self-supporting? They perceive themselves as self-sufficient already at extracting resources from the environment with no awareness or moral objection to their dependence upon willing taxpayers – or that they are depleting the very environment they depend upon.

Total number of black Americans: 42,000,000
# of black Americans on welfare: 1,711,400
% of black Americans on welfare: 4.07%

While there are numerous other government assistance programs, this simple set of statistics belies the media narrative that black America is represented by the urban welfare society, which is a complete fabrication. One of the problems we face is that both blacks and whites have bought into this false narrative. The issues with the inner-city ghetto culture are not dominated by race but by the societal hunter-gather paradigm and functional illiteracy and cross all races. The other two most significant statistics to be evaluated are the number of people dependent upon social security disability and food stamps – additional popular sources of “gathering” for the chronic (i.e., non-productive) poor.

As long as we consider this cultural divide as a racial issue, we will continue to bark up the wrong tree and only exacerbate the problems. In fact, there are considerable vested interests who are actively working to sustain and escalate the social, cultural divide.

Are we merely witnessing yet another collision between food production and hunger-gatherer societies? If so, why would they want to change? What can we do to help?